Recent devices, especially Windows 8 compatible devices, instead export a HID device, which, under Linux, is handled through the IIO subsystem. So the first version of iio-sensor-proxy took readings from the IIO sub-system and emulated the WeTab's accelerometer: a few too many levels of indirection.

The 1.0 version of the daemon implements a D-Bus interface, which means we can support more than accelerometers. The D-Bus API, this time, is modelled after the Android and iOS APIs.

Enjoying

Accelerometers will work in GNOME 3.18 as well as it used to, once a few bugs have been merged[1]. If you need support for older versions of GNOME, you can try using version 0.1 of the proxy.

The major problem at the time was that ambient light sensor reading weren't in any particular unit (values had different meanings for different vendors) and the user felt that they were fighting against the computer for the control of the backlight.

Richardfixed that though, adapting work he did on the ColorHug ALS sensor, and the brightness is now completely in the user's control, and adapts to the user's tastes. This means that we can implement the simplest of UIs for its configuration.

Power saving in action

This will be available in the upcoming GNOME 3.17.2 development release.

Great news! Precisely last month I was thinking about the support ambient light sensors in Gnome.My MacBook Pro have a built-in sensor and exist some ways to play with this on Linux but not in a convenient way with Gnome. On the other hand, I was planning to craft an Android app to share ambient light sensor data with an desktop PC and adjust brightness and contrast automatically using the old DDC Control, that works perfect with my Dell monitor. I wonder If those features will be supported by Gnome in a near future. Thanks!

Miguel: the sensors in the MacBooks will work, but there are no plans to control stand-alone monitors via such crude controls. If they had their own sensors and allowed the backlight to be changed however...

Excellent work, mate! If I may ask you, will gnome enable color customization for a theme something like a made by Sam Hewitt in here http://snwh.org/paper/ . Unfortunately, I see the theme color only applies on a few applications (calculator, editor) but does not apply on most application (directory explorer, gimp, Firefox and others).

I really like if gnome will support such color customization for all application so users will have more choice to modernize their desktop look.

One more request, :), please support transparency, something like windows Aura will be amazing. Thanks.